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Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

fortune.com

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Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#41

Post by Alex3917 »

dang wrote: post #35
Alex3917 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already did, she was in prison for a year on charges relating to the 'dangerous' drug marijuana. I called almost verbatim what the chief of police actually said in the other thread and had my comment downvoted and flagged for it.

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620402 , it's unclear what it means and how you meant it. I'm sure many readers took it literally.

I mean I did mean it literally as a factual legal statement, not as a normative statement on how society should work.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#44

Post by CardenB »

brian-armstrong wrote: post #36

So here's one thing about this incident where humans do have a system for this already. People are very good at reading body language. It's possible to gather someone's likely intentions (wrt moving) in a near instant. A defensive driver will see body language that could dart out into the street and slow down, just in case, and give more attention to the person. We are really good at this. I know you can say it was d…

How do you know that this is not possible? It is not useful to make broad generalizations about the field because of a single company, especially with so little information.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#45

Post by akamaka »

I don’t think that the opinion of the police is at all relevant here, since they have no tools for investigating how self-driving cars react in accidents.

The sensors and reaction time of a self-driving car are entirely different from a human, so it’s possible that a crash for which a human is not at fault could be averted by properly programmed self-driving car software.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#46

Post by fthssht »

halflings wrote: post #19
blakesterz wrote: post #13

> “The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” Moir said. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.” I don't know if that is supposed to make anyone feel better about this, if anything it makes it seem worse. I thought one of the big benefits of these systems was they were supposed to be better at exactly these kinds of situations? More like "autonomous cars a…

If somebody jumped in front of the car at the last second, it would be physically impossible to break in time. I assume what people mean by "stopping in a flash" is closer to taking the right actions faster (e.g 40ms vs 800ms) when there's still a chance of changing the outcome.

800ms is pretty slow for a sober human I think

https://www.humanbenchmark.com/tests/reactiontime/statistics

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#47

Post by dang »

Alex3917 wrote: post #41
dang wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you mean https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620402 , it's unclear what it means and how you meant it. I'm sure many readers took it literally.

I mean I did mean it literally as a factual legal statement, not as a normative statement on how society should work.

Right—that was unclear, though, and if some readers took it as an endorsement I'm sure you can understand why they'd flag it.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#48

Post by dang »

The massive earlier discussion is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917, but since the current thread is rising we can let it have the next shift on the front page.

Edit: some people have objected that it's biased to let the discussion shift to "Police say Uber is likely not at fault" in place of the original report about the death. That's a fair point, so we've taken the downweight off the original story.

Just so it's clear: usually what we do when there's a major ongoing story is let discussion hop from an earlier submission to a later one as significant new information arises. We link to thread n-1 from thread n, so people who want to follow back can do so, but the idea is to have only one thread about the story—the latest one—on the front page at a time.

In this case, though, it's debatable whether "police say" counts as significant new information. And we don't want to be biased. So we'll restore the previous thread and err and have two on the front page for a while.

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#49

Post by brian-armstrong »

CardenB wrote: post #44
brian-armstrong wrote: post #36

So here's one thing about this incident where humans do have a system for this already. People are very good at reading body language. It's possible to gather someone's likely intentions (wrt moving) in a near instant. A defensive driver will see body language that could dart out into the street and slow down, just in case, and give more attention to the person. We are really good at this. I know you can say it was d…

How do you know that this is not possible? It is not useful to make broad generalizations about the field because of a single company, especially with so little information.

I never said anything like that. Did you mean to reply to another comment?

Re: Police Say Uber Is Likely Not at Fault for Self-Driving Car Fatality in Arizona

#50

Post by CydeWeys »

stefan_ wrote: post #10

This is just police standard operating procedure. In any kind of manslaughter where a vehicle is involved, save on paperwork and blame whichever party ended up dead before the driver has even spoken the words "she came from nowhere". Here is the police chief spelling it out for Uber: she came from the shadows I wonder what that LIDAR thinks about the shadows . I mean, this system is in place because everybody drives…

You aren't kidding about it being standard operating procedure. Almost every time a pedestrian or cyclist is killed in New York City, the police come out and blame anyone but the driver. And then video will turn up afterwards showing that the driver was driving unsafely, and that the fatal accident could have been avoided. Still, no charges are filed. It's like they have an allergy to paperwork.

I want to see video of this fatal crash. Nothing else will suffice.

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